Barack Obama left Australia 'swinging in the breeze' over air strikes: Kevin Rudd

Barack Obama asked Kevin Rudd to be on standby to support a forthcoming US missile strike on Syria, but failed to tell him when it was called off.

Australia and Canada were both left "swinging in the breeze", the former Australian prime minister reveals in his new book.

Mr Rudd writes that the US president had twice phoned to tell him America's intentions. Mr Obama asked that Australia and other US allies publicly call on America in advance to strike Syria after its regime used chemical weapons on its own people.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd with former US president Barack Obama. Credit:David Foote- Auspic/DPS

It was in support of Mr Obama's famous "red line" threat against Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad, a threat he failed to act upon.

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"We had done what we had been asked to do in arguing publicly for a hardline American response," Mr Rudd recounts in The PM Years.

Anticipating a US attack on Syria on the same day that he was due to launch Labor's campaign for the 2013 election, Mr Rudd wrote two different speeches.

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He took to the election launch a "war speech" and a "peace speech". "It would look entirely absurd to be speaking of schools, hospitals and climate change if there were American cruise missiles flying around the Middle East," he writes in the book.

But the US strike never came. "My office was never informed by the Americans of the change in plan.

"Both Canadian prime minister [Stephen] Harper and myself were left swinging in the breeze.

"Obviously other priorities were at play in Obama's White House that afternoon."

The US ambassador to Canberra at the time, Jeff Bleich, concurred on Monday that "Kevin mightn't have got the full briefing."

In explanation, Mr Bleich said "that was the time Russia contacted us to say that they would broker a deal to eliminate all Syria's chemical weapons.

"That would be a better outcome than a strike and with chemical weapons still out there in Syria, so we had to assess."

Mr Rudd writes that he disagreed with Mr Obama's decision to call off the punitive strike: "Obama got cold feet. And the rest is history. His credibility would suffer as a result because he had proclaimed his own red line and then done nothing to enforce it."

This turned out to be a crucial decision in modern history. Russia and China were both emboldened. They proceeded to annex territory claimed by their neighbours, Crimea in Russia's case and areas of the South China Sea in China's.

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Moscow and Beijing ignored Mr Obama's demands to desist, confident that the US would not intervene to stop them.

Russia's offer to remove all Syria's chemical weapons was not delivered. Assad went on to use chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war many times.

The next US president, Donald Trump, launched punitive missile strikes against Assad regime assets in a joint operation with with France and Britain.